SPIN: 10 TOURS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD
10 TOURS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD
LIVE PERFORMANCE PREDATES RECORDED MUSIC BY, WELL, ABOUT 3
MILLION YEARS. BUT WE HAD OUR HANDS FULL JUST LOOKING THROUGH
THE PAST 50 TO FIND THE MOST IMPORTANT TOURS IN POP MUSIC. CAN A
ROCK CONCERT CHANGE THE WORLD? YES. FOR THE BETTER? NOT
NECESSARILY
Various Artists
Lollapalooza, 1991-1997
1
The first year I went to Lollapalooza, I thought about
salvation. Was alternative rock, this thing being invented
before my eyes and ears, saving us? Or did we need to be saved
from it? "When people smell that they can potentially make a lot
of money, doors open," explains Jane's Addiction frontman Perry
Farrell, who cofounded the festival in 1991 with his manager,
Ted Gardner, and booking agent Marc Geiger. "I don't necessarily
think that's a bad thing."
Crystallizing the tension between healthy growth and
exploitation, Lollapalooza uprooted and transformed rock's
underground. The first year, which featured Jane's Addiction,
Siouxsie and the Banshees, Living Colour, Nine Inch Nails,
Fishbone, Violent Femmes, Ice T and Body Count, Butthole
Surfers, and the Rollins Band, was chaotic. "Everybody was
flying by the seat of their pants," says Farrell. "The very
first day we played, I got into a full-on brawl with Dave
Navarro."
Mostly, though, the commotion was healthy, and the festival
quickly evolved from bright idea to institution. "I remember it
coming together," recalls Thurston Moore, who headlined in '96
with Sonic Youth. "They were selling out outdoor spaces and
every kid was going to it. All of a sudden, here was this
demographic that was not being counted in the industry sense."
In '92, my first Lollapalooza, I wasn't sure I wanted to be part
of a demographic. I feared the jocks screaming for the Red Hot
Chili Peppers and the dudes yelling "Faggot!" at the people
manning the ACT UP table. But for every instance of
countercultural malaise, I found a hopeful sign. While Ice Cube
got mostly ignored on the main stage, Samoan rappers Boo-Yaa
T.R.I.B.E. on the second stage drew a throng. The vendors
overcharged for water and falafel, but anyone could bang on the
Rhythm Beast-a scrap-metal percussion sculpture-for free. Lush
were kind of tired, but nothing could have been fresher than
Farrell debuting his new band, Porno for Pyros, in a surprise
afternoon set also on the second stage. Offering up relative
unknowns like Tool, Moby, Luscious Jackson, and Ben Folds Five
over the years, the second stage was in a way the heart of
Lollapalooza.
But there were plenty of milestones on the main stage. Temple of
the Dog, the short-lived Soundgarden/Pearl Jam hybrid, played
some of their few dates on the 1992 tour. 1993 saw Rage Against
the Machine stage their famous anti-censorship protest, standing
naked with mouths taped, in Philadelphia. George Clinton and the
P-Funk Allstars taught a new generation to funk in 1994;
Pavement, Sonic Youth, and Moby made magic in 1995, and even in
1996, the metal-heavy "bad" year, the Ramones rocked some of
their last shows, reminding us where all this chaos came from.
As the '90s rolled on, skepticism about the festival
intensified. When the decidedly non-alt-rock Metallica headlined
in 1996, even Farrell questioned its survival, breaking off to
start his own rave-flavored, short-lived ENIT fest that year.
("Why didn't they listen to me?" Farrell laments about the
festival's change in aesthetics. "Maybe because I was a
fucked-up drug addict.") Major-label money had come to govern
the bill, and the festival game was suddenly crowded with
imitators-the Vans Warped tour, Lilith Fair, Smokin' Grooves,
Ozzfest. Even today, virtually every package out there
second-guesses Lollapalooza's success and its mistakes.
Lollapalooza went kaput after 1997, following a laudably
forward-looking bill featuring both dance acts (the Prodigy,
Orbital) and new metalists (Tool, Korn). Alternative was now
part of our cultural DNA. But its originators haven't despaired
of the model's possibilities. Sonic Youth are planning to curate
a comparable festival at UCLA this fall. This summer, Moby
launches Area: One (see page 90), and Farrell, in a sort of
mini-reprise of Lollapalooza '91-a.k.a. the Jane's Addiction
farewell tour-has invited Sasha and Digweed and Roni Size to
rock this summer's Jane's Addiction reunion tour.
Farrell also hopes to stage a jubilee-style festival in Israel
soon. "God gave this commandment to Moses and said every 50
years Israel was supposed to celebrate with music, free the
slaves, and reapportion land," he says. "First and foremost, He
specified the musical instruments. This is a commandment to
party. A conscious party!" At its best, Lollapalooza fulfilled
this mandate and saved us all-if only for one long day.
ANN POWERS
Various Artists
Raising Hell tour, 1986
2
It wasn't the first big national rap outing, but Raising Hell,
featuring Run-D.M.C., Whodini, L.L. Cool J, and openers the
Beastie Boys, was the moment when hip-hop became the new
rock'n'roll. By September 15, 1986, the 15-week, 62-city tour
was over, and Run-D.M.C.'s album of the same name was
double-platinum. "The Raising Hell tour spearheaded the advance
of hip-hop into the white community," says Bill Adler, then
director of publicity for Rush Artist Management and today an
unofficial historian of the tour. "It was the end of racial
segregation in popular music."
While Raising Hell crisscrossed America, Run-D.M.C.'s remake of
Aerosmith's "Walk This Way" ruled MTV. "[Def Jam cofounder] Rick
Rubin's contention was this was rock'n'roll all along," Adler
says. "Remaking 'Walk This Way' made the point in an
unmistakable way." The tour was dogged by bad press fomented by
post-show arrests in Pittsburgh and New York City. And a
gang-related mini-riot on August 17 in Long Beach, California,
stopped the show and left 40 people injured. Despite its
problems, the tour, in hindsight, established the Beasties (who
released Licensed to Ill that November) as legitimate
predecessors of one Marshall Mathers. It also celebrated both
L.L. Cool J and Whodini in the full flush of their creative
primes.
Magazines and newspapers spit out various iterations of the "Rap
Gets a Bad Rap" headline and chased down the "Are our children
safe?" angle, noticeably missing the "Will hip-hop become the
world's youth culture?" angle. (Silly, shortsighted
periodicals!) The bad press was both bad-meaning-bad and
bad-meaning-good for Run-D.M.C. and their costars. Looking back,
D.M.C. says, "We overused, we overindulged, and we overtook the
music industry."
SASHA FRERE-JONES
The Beatles
U.S. tour, 1965
3
The Beatles made their second major tour of the States in the
summer of 1965, and I was lucky enough to win tickets to one of
the shows. It's the only thing I've ever won. I was 14, living
in Portland, Oregon, and the concert was at the Memorial
Coliseum-a 20,000-seat sports and convention center. There were
two, three, maybe four other acts on the bill. Gerry and the
Pacemakers? Roy Head? I can't be sure. So much of that afternoon
felt like a fever dream.
At a certain point, a small legion of Portland policemen lined
up in front of the stage; I counted roughly 200. The house
lights went down, but so many flashbulbs were suddenly going off
that you could see the Beatles moving through the darkness
onstage. As the spotlights came up, the band vaulted into its
first number-but to this day, I couldn't tell you what it was.
The truth is, you couldn't really hear George Harrison's witty
riffs or Ringo Starr's bumpy tom rolls; you couldn't distinguish
Paul McCartney's ecstatic croon from John Lennon's creative
howl. All you could hear was the amassed shriek of the audience.
It was a full-throated, uncontained, celebratory, and needy cry,
and it never relented for the duration of the half-hour show.
At first, I was annoyed: I wanted to hear the Beatles, wanted to
hear current hits like "Help!" and "Ticket to Ride." After all,
if you look at some of the concert footage from that tour or
play the now inexplicably out-of-print The Beatles at the
Hollywood Bowl album, you realize just how damn good-tight,
clever, and dynamic-the band was live. After a few minutes,
though, I understood that this wasn't about hearing great music.
It was the gestalt of an experience that genuinely felt like
living revelation. At one point, I realized my own voice was
screaming along with all the others. But I couldn't stop it-I
felt so full of exhilaration and faith. Nothing has ever matched
how overwhelming those moments were, watching those musicians
through the flickering luminescence of flashbulbs as they played
in the fractional lights of history.
The Beatles' first U.S. tour, in 1964, was more earth-rattling,
and their final trek, in 1966-after Lennon boasted that they
were bigger than Jesus Christ and the band had grown
disillusioned with live performances-was more world-weary. I saw
the Beatles during a brief time when kids could still gather and
scream and not meet with fear, resentment, and retribution,
before everything around us-the music, the culture, the
politics-turned into a setting for division and dread. You could
scream those days in a shared awareness: that life might be good
after all, and if nothing else, you were lucky enough to be
living it in a time when the Beatles' every gesture seemed to
illuminate the world.
MIKAL GILMORE
Photo courtesy of Sindri at
http://www.sindrismadonnapage.com/
Madonna
The Virgin tour, 1985
4
In 1985, I was a skinny, underdeveloped sixth grader who'd been
forcibly plucked from Brooklyn and replanted in the desert of
Arizona. To add insult to injury, my parents had enrolled me in
a private school known for teaching snobby kids from gated
communities how to speak French like natives. I didn't exactly
fit in.
Fortunately, there was Madonna, the great equalizer. In
suburbia, every preteen subset-from the skater chicks and sluts
to the cheerleaders and math geeks-collectively bonded over
mesh-lace gloves and black rubber bracelets. The squeals in
"Like a Virgin" were our watchwords. And when the
underwhelmingly talented singer/dancer/demagogue came to town,
we all transcended our virginity together.
The Virgin tour was Madonna's first, yet it put her in the same
league with superstars like Prince and Springsteen. True, she'd
already sold 16 million singles and albums, and she'd recently
starred in Desperately Seeking Susan. Still, the Virgin tour
proved that Madonna was beyond real. And if her stage presence
indicated she was more showgirl than musician, at least she knew
how to gussy up her act for the postfeminist, MTV age. Boy Toy?
Not exactly. She was a bona fide pop star in the process of
becoming a cultural icon.
A lot of critics assumed this sacrilegious pop tart would
supernova like so many other starlets. But most of them weren't
12-year-olds praying for a heroine. Since then, she's sold 42
million albums and metamorphosed at least a dozen times,
sometimes missing her mark, but always ahead of the curve. Most
important to me, she convinced a flat-chested schoolgirl that
being outside the "in" crowd was the coolest thing to be.
HEIDI SHERMAN
Photo courtesy of Brett Saul at
http://www.globevision.com/deadpics/frames.html
The Grateful Dead
The Tour: 1967-1995
5
Ken Kesey's 1966 Acid Tests in San Francisco. Europe 1972. The
Egyptian Pyramids, 1978. Like my best friend's T-shirt said,
reeking of sativa and inevitability: GRATEFUL DEAD ON THE MOON.
But when you're On Tour, it's not where you're at-it's that you
haven't really been home in a few years. Except for how you'd
walk into a hockey rink in a town called Whatever and some
complete stranger who you, like, totally recognized would give
you a hug and say, "Welcome home."
The Grateful Dead were the counterculture's house band-or at
least the segment of it less stoked about marching on Washington
than about exploring new social relations under the rubric
"freedom" and new states of mind flatteringly dubbed "higher
consciousness." A show was an extended and sometimes aimless
exploration of what higher consciousness might sound like (at
least to the ears of middle-class white youths). And for
freedom, or an incredible simulation, we had the Tour-the house
band leaving the house and taking the culture with it. A slogan
became an itinerary: Turn on, Tune in, Drop out.
And you could just keep dropping. Led by Jerry Garcia, genius
guitarist/tawdry messiah, the band's improvisational musicology
and fat songbook promised a new show (and, for the obsessives, a
new tape) every night for 28 years. And the crowd's religious
cohesion promised a movable feast. Some kids rode trust funds,
some slaved for the Man during downtimes. Plenty fell into the
Tour's self-sustaining shadow economy, hawking tie-dyes here,
cheese'n'sprouts sandwiches there, and shuffling less-legal
items in the parking lots of each Whateversville. It was, as a
friend once observed, "a perpetual Disneyland for drug addicts."
For many on the outside, the concerts-with their ritualized
spirituality and tediously brilliant "drums/space" jams-became a
kind of weird cultural relic, like Broadway musicals or
theosophy. "We used to joke about incorporating as a religion,"
says singer/guitarist Bob Weir. But even after a few dead
keyboardists, more than a few run-ins with the law, millions of
dollars (by the '90s, they were one of the world's
highest-grossing touring acts), and great disillusionment on the
part of band and fans alike, there was no packing it in. "The
crowd's idolatry had gotten cancerous," says Weir. "It was
hardest on Jerry. He was drugged out and half-asleep-but we
could still crank it out." Finally, nothing could stop the Tour
short of Garcia's heroin-abetted death in 1995.
But not even that could stop the underlying ideas. Dedicating
your life to following a band around may still seem silly, but
it's also found a permanent spot in the flowchart of teen
decision-making, part of the psychic economy that's kept Phish
and Dave Matthews in motion. But mostly, the Tour-no less than
Elvis or punk-was a big idea genuinely rooted in its cultural
moment: rock's impossible and inevitably fucked pass at utopian
group dynamics (since bequeathed to the ravers). Finally, there
was no revolution, no escape from same-shit-different-day. But
it always seemed like that's what the band, and the crowd, kept
blindly, blissfully running after- from town to town, whatever
to whatever.
JOSHUA CLOVER
Various Artists
Alan Freed's rock'n'roll package tours, 1952-1958
6
THE MOST TERRIBLE BALL OF THEM ALL! screamed posters for the
Moondog Coronation Ball in spring 1952. More than 20,000 teens
gathered outside the Cleveland Arena for a show headlined by
now-forgotten R&B performers Paul "Hucklebuck" Williams and Tiny
Grimes. The arena seated only 10,000, so police shut the event
down before it started-and all hell broke loose. The result,
according to the late critic Robert Palmer: "The first rock and
roll concert was also the occasion of the first rock and roll
riot."
The ball's 30-year-old mastermind, local DJ and promoter Alan
Freed, soon appropriated the name "rock'n'roll"-an old blues
double entendre for fucking. The sound wasn't new, but the
audience was: On radio, stage, and TV, Freed took gutbucket,
juke-joint R&B and brought it to postwar white youth starved for
sexual release. "They had ten years of crooners and undanceable
music," explained Freed, who was promoting what The New York
Times called "an epidemic hysteria." This cut deeper than the
idol worship of Sinatra or, later, Elvis, because it wasn't
about celebrity but strictly about the music: a raw underground
sound that Freed called the "Big Beat." The hysteria was real.
By the mid-'50s, Freed was based in New York City, and his
package tours had become the stuff of instant legend, featuring
larger casts of performers, black and white, and bigger melees,
packing large halls and skating rinks. This was cultural anarchy
long before the Sex Pistols, as racially mixed audiences worked
themselves into a collective frenzy. In '58 came Freed's Big
Beat extravaganza-12 acts, including Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee
Lewis, barnstorming 38 cities. It imploded in the 7,000-seat
Boston Arena, where rival gangs converged, fights erupted, and a
sailor was stabbed. "The absolute fear on Chuck Berry's face
told you it wasn't 'normal' crowd rowdiness," recalls George
Moonoogian, then a high school senior who was near the stage.
Freed was banned in New Haven, Connecticut, and the rest of the
tour fell apart. But the revolution was on.
EDDIE DEAN
Photo by David Harpe
Various Artists
Ozzfest, 1998
7
The traveling circus of bolted youth and n?metal known as
Ozzfest arose from the ashes of a less-than-triumphant meeting
between Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne and a group of Lollapalooza
organizers in 1995. Despite the fact that almost every heavy
band of the '90s owed a debt of influence to Black Sabbath, the
Lollapalooza folks were unwilling, according to Mrs. Osbourne,
to give Ozzy a slot on their main stage. So the Osbournes, as is
their way, said, "Fuck you," and started their own touring
extravaganza, dedicated to Ozzy, Sabbath, and the gnarlier of
their musical heirs. By 1997, Ozzfest was a smash success,
raking in $13 million. Nearly every band on the '98 main-stage
lineup (Ozzy, Megadeth, Tool, and Soulfly) spoke to the warty
souls who weren't feeling alt-rock or Eddie Vedder's pain. At
the time, Ozzy said, "What I want to do, especially on the
second stage, is give an unknown band a springboard, a band that
wouldn't normally get the opportunity to play in front of that
many people. I love passing the torch to the next generation."
But the Ozzmeister probably didn't expect to pass the torch, or
even a Mag-Lite, to a doughy dork in a red backward baseball
cap. Nevertheless, Limp Bizkit stole Ozzfest '98. It made sense,
too: Durst and Co. merely took the white-male rage that has
always simmered in hard guitar music from Sabbath to Sepultura
and refried it with stiffened funk. Ozzfest '98 launched Bizkit
and sealed the deal between old-school metal and n?school
rapcore. As a result, Ozzfest evolved into a transgenerational
showcase and a proving ground for hard rockers. While the tour
has helped polarize music into metal and pop-lite camps, it's
still a powerful imprimatur: You're notreallyheavy until you've
eaten at Ozzy's table.
PAT BLASHILL
James Brown
World tour, 1968
8
It wasn't a tour per se-with J.B. in the late '60s, it was more
a free-form marathon of history-making, inescapably political
funk blitzes. In April, he performed in Africa for the first
time, in Ivory Coast, returning for a show at the Boston Garden
on what proved to be the day after Martin Luther King Jr.'s
assassination. The city mandarins, hoping to keep potential
rioters home, bought out the gate in exchange for permission to
broadcast the show on public TV; James burned, and Beantown
didn't. In June he was in Saigon, turning it loose for U.S.
troops in 100-plus degree heat while drum-gunner Clyde
Stubblefield and distant artillery provided fills. He returned
home to play for 48,000 at Yankee Stadium. Before the summer was
over, the hardest-working man in showbiz would be called an
Uncle Tom for releasing the proto-rap "America Is My Home" and a
militant agitator for releasing "Say it Loud-I'm Black and I'm
Proud." On the former, he reflected in his autobiography, The
Godfather of Soul, "America is my home." On the latter: "Really,
if you listen to it, it sounds like a children's song."
WILL HERMES
Black Flag
Various tours of duty, 1981-1982
9
Greg Ginn is bleeding again. The Black Flag guitarist is clawing
wildly at his strings and screwing up his face like he's caught
in a centrifuge. The drummer is pounding away with the
disciplined fury of a military pit bull, and he's got the name
to match: Robo. The Mohawked Chuck Dukowski is screaming at the
audience and swinging his bass like a baseball bat. Meanwhile,
"singer" Henry Rollins is alternately barking, lunging at the
punks in the first row, grinding his hips like a hardcore Jim
Morrison, and grinning maniacally like a genuine Charles Manson.
This was Black Flag circa 1981 in Anytown, USA, featuring new
member Rollins, a former Flag fanatic who was asked to be
frontman because previous singer Dez Cadena's voice couldn't
hold up on grueling tours. Flag's dogged assault on America in
the early Reagan years refined the do-it-yourself ethic that
became central to hardcore and, later, indie and alternative
music. Black Flag taught by example, showing nascent punks that
DIY meant hard work and ingenuity: putting up posters, making
barely functioning vans traverse mountains, and, most important,
releasing their own records, which Ginn did through his heroic
SST imprint. "Black Flag was a lot of hungry times, a lot of
missed meals, sleeping in your wet clothes in the back of the
van," Henry Rollins told me in 1994. "Imagine living in Das Boot
for five years."
Along the way, the band became hardcore's Mothership. They
talked their way into rock clubs that otherwise wouldn't have
taken a chance on punk rock. (Many of these became outposts in a
national network of venues that were still welcoming bands like
Nirvana ten years later.) Black Flag often toured with other SST
artists, exposing fans to top bands like the Minutemen and the
Meat Puppets. But for Ginn, Flag's cross-country sorties were
also part of a personal mission. "I thought Black Flag should be
the biggest thing in the world," he says today. "And I thought
everyone should be subjected to us, whether they wanted it or
not."
PAT BLASHILL
Photo Courtesy of Jason Wagner
at www.eminem2000.com
Various Artists
Up in Smoke tour, 2000
10
Before Fresh Fest rolled out to rock the nationwide party with a
crew of non-sucker East-coast MCs like Run-D.M.C., Whodini, the
Fat Boys, and Kurtis Blow back in the fall of 1984, hip-hop jams
were still happening mostly in inner-city schoolyards. After 27
gigs, Fresh Fest I grossed $3.5 million; mostly black audiences
peacefully filled arenas just to get a glimpse of the groups
they'd been trading on homemade mix tapes. In 1986 there was
Raising Hell; by 1988, a handful of national rap tours were
bumping around the country, but random outbreaks of violence
caused a severe live hip-hop drought that would last more than a
decade.
Then along came last year's boomin' Up in Smoke tour, the
by-product of a left-coast thunderstorm that reasserted Cali
dominance in the face of Ruff Ryders and Cash Money. Scores of
white, Napster-addled kids came in peace to see TQ and Nate
Dogg, the hip-hop crooners; Warren G, the G-funk marshal;
Kurupt, the gangbanger; Xzibit, the hip-hop superhero; Ice Cube,
the gracefully graying gangsta; Snoop, the top Dogg; Dre, the
good doctor; and a lighter-skinned brotha from Michigan called
Eminem-Trailer Park Nation's very own Rakim. "If you bought a
ticket, come in and enjoy the show," Dre said. "I don't give a
fuck what color you are out there."
And what a show it was. Eminem's run was supported by two
20-foot inflatable hands that flew the bird definitively. But it
was headliner Dre's entry that made Up in Smoke: a mini-movie
starring Dre and Snoop in which the devastating duo find
themselves in the thick of a liquor store shoot-out. After the
last of the punks is rounded up, the Dr. and the Dogg-with guns
drawn-look out into a sea of bloodthirsty fans and ask: Should
we blast him? After a flash, the Compton/Long Beach connection
strolls out of the onstage liquor store facade and gets busy.
Art imitating life imitating art? The rest of the house came in
through the metal detectors-very OG.
SACHA JENKINS
--
※ Origin: 交大機械工廠 ◆ From: 61-220-188-189.HINET-IP.hinet.net
Madonna 近期熱門文章
PTT偶像團體區 即時熱門文章
